Planners and Planning Trying to Find Their Way in the World

If you were lost in the woods, what would you do? You would try to find your way out, of course. You would need to get your bearings, figure out where you were headed, and navigate appropriately given the terrain in which you were trapped. Some of my planning colleagues at the University of North Carolina appear to be lost. Moreover, they think the whole profession has lost its way – lost its professional identity, given up whatever authority it once had, and misplaced its vision of the future. Let’s look more closely at how and why the North Carolina folks are feeling so disoriented. They seem to have awakened from a dream in which planners had the authority to tell everybody what to do, the power to impose their will on anyone who didn’t agree with them and a monopoly on good ideas. Ah, now I see the problem. They were dreaming about a place and time that never existed. So, of course, they are feeling out of sorts now that they have opened their eyes